Over the past couple of years, AI and Machine Learning has received a lot of attention. We can now get an almost perfect summary of many subjects generated by computer, and that could just be the start of the next computer revolution. However, there are many concerns about AI too, from algorithmic bias caused by bad data, to AI causing inequality by disproportionally benefiting wealthy individuals and corporations.

Dr Melvyn Weeks is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Fellow of Clare College. He has a particular interest in AI, writing papers and teaching on the subject, as well as holding the 2023 Econometrics Summer School. Julian Lorkin sat down with him, to look at how AI has the potential to contribute to economic analysis.

Robert Holzmann the Governor of Austria’s central bank, the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, gave a lecture in the Faculty this spring explaining what is happening now that interest rates, inflation, and monetary policy are nearing historically normal levels.

Forecasting when an armed conflict is likely to break out is notoriously difficult, and history has shown conflict might suddenly appear out of a previously long lived and low-level dispute. However new developments in a ‘Conflict Model’ developed at the Faculty of Economics is showing much more accuracy.

It has been developed by Professor of Economics and Data Science Christopher Rauh who spoke with Julian Lorkin about his motivation for developing the model, and where it will go from here.

The Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Economics, Finance and Management category has gone to The Faculty's Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta for defining the field of environmental economics by incorporating and quantifying the social value of nature, including his work on the Dasgupta Review.

A student at the Faculty of Economics has been awarded the Gladstone Memorial Prize for his dissertation "An Investigation into the Distributional Effects of Hydraulic Fracturing".